By month

November 2018

72 tweets
116 likes
9 retweets
35 retweeted

Retweeted @SarahAMcManus

Amazing! Hope to visit some time I'm out west. Essay uses a metaphor of flashlights vs room lighting - the isolation of…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

I seem to be getting more eye contact from strangers today than usual

@visakanv

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Retweeted @SarahAMcManus

@KevinSimler Hmm, if I'm taking it more thoughtfully... I'm wanting to separate out two kinds of email "debt". One invol…

Retweeted @devonzuegel

I’m increasingly of the belief that incentive design is the most important problem to work on. Humans are good at overcomi…

Retweeted @alexandraerin

So I just saw someone wondering how liberals can cut ties with conservative friends and family members over immigration…

@ElectroSpit There's a bug on your site and I can't seem to "sign up". I just found out about y'all and I'm like HOLY SHIT I NEED THIS. (I was searching "bluetooth talkbox", imagining a tiny speaker I'd put in my mouth. This looks waaaaay better.)

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I'm really hooked on inside view. I know other people say it's bad, but it just makes so much sense to me.

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Retweeted @SarahAMcManus

Explores an idea that's presented more cynically in David Brin's short story "The Giving Plague"... …

Replying to Sarah McManus ✨🍲 BOLD SOUP🍲✨ @SarahAMcManus ·

Explores an idea that's presented more cynically in David Brin's short story "The Giving Plague"...

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

quoting @QuantaMagazine: From the archives: Some parasites compel their hosts to bizarre and even suicidal behaviors. Could selfish parasites also secretly make their hosts (including us) more altruistic? https://t.co/YibLO2Vfaw

@SarahAMcManus Wow! Adds a whole new layer to @Meaningness's "nebulosity of self" thing...

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@selfprime @autotrnslucence Oh man, I've hit this with my business @CompliceGoals like 3 times now. Got some new tricks up my sleeve for the coming year though... (In particular, I think I can reduce X a little and double N, which should double the plateau height)

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Replying to David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf ·

@autotrnslucence @webdevMason Some projects last a lifetime. Some last several. If that's inherent in your problem-situation, there's no danger in contributing to such a project, so long as it isn't based on a prophecy that demands some unpleasant payment in advance.

@DavidDeutschOxf @autotrnslucence @webdevMason Essentially you're looking for an investment of your time and energy that will pay dividends rather than require you to have bet on the right moments to buy and sell. (Note: this is much more complex in reality than stocks: dividends include delight, learning, etc)

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run that koan through your beard

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The grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up to the top of the hill And he marched them down again And when they were up they were up And when they were down they were down And when they were only halfway up They were practicing fuzzy logic!

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TFW when you write code & tests, and your tests are failing, and after a bunch of analysis you realize the code was right and the testcases wrong. (it's messy date stuff like "Which week of which year is it on Jan 1st 2019 if weeks start on wednesday?" (A = week 52 of 2018))

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Retweeted @AlanWattsDaily

Billions of years ago you were a big bang. You're not something that's a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You'…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

I’ve been thinking a lot about “the molecular chemistry of human relations”, re: groups that are 3-12 people in size. People are more complicated than molecules obviously, but there are familiar, stable configurations we fall into and I don’t often see much talk about them

quoting @visakanv: There’s a nexus of friends you have when you’re single, and the nexus of friends you have when you’re married/with kids. There can be some overlap, but overall there’s a sort of “molecular structure” to each state that’s quite hard to break https://t.co/cgvKUFMoM9

@visakanv I'm interested in your thoughts on this! It's relevant to some projects I'm working on and other thoughts of mine.

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Retweeted @innesmck

my dad just told me he makes decisions now by emailing himself a potential plan and reading gmail's suggested auto-responses…

Wow, I was pitching @Conaw about almost exactly this idea ("everything is tables") just 2 days ago, and then Coda published this yesterday: blog.coda.io/new-building-b…

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Well, you know what they say...

•Freyja• @utotranslucence ·

‘Studies show’ is the new ‘God says’

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Retweeted @SarahAMcManus

I hold that the risks of superhuman AI are worth considering, and examining current "algocracy" risks is also worthwhile…

Replying to Sarah McManus ✨🍲 BOLD SOUP🍲✨ @SarahAMcManus ·

I hold that the risks of superhuman AI are worth considering, and examining current "algocracy" risks is also worthwhile. Interesting term! Hadn't heard it before, and looked it up - means governance by algorithms, lacking transparency and participation: calumchace.wordpress.com/2018/08/22/alg…

quoting @michaelgarfield: This piece by @sfiscience #scientist @MelMitchell1 cuts through the @elonmusk #Singularity fear-mongering to the REAL and imminent danger: our reckless rush into dependence on an #algocracy of #AI that doesn't understand the decisions it's executing... @HumansForAI @ai4allorg

@SarahAMcManus Related: twitter.com/innesmck/statu…

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Replying to Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal ·

Perhaps humanity’s greatest extinction risk is not climate change or rogue AI, but people losing interest in procreation due to finding fulfilment in the endless phantasmagoria of technogenic distractions.

@G_S_Bhogal @michaelporcelli Not really, because all it takes is one (genetic or memetic) variant that *isn't* susceptible to this, and it will obviously be evolutionarily more fit. Bigger risk of distractions is collapse of economy, which could happen before any chance to adapt.

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Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

I don't usually care for discussions about tools, but it feels like it's been long enough that I might be missing out on what's good. What apps and tools do ya'll use to take care of your stuff? Calendars, todo lists, pomodoro timers, etc – what's working for you? What's good?

@visakanv complice.co is a goal-oriented daily todo list with a built-in pomodoro timer and a bunch of other cool features. (In case you don't know, I'll mention that this is my app, but its unique and good and it does legit work for me as a user too!)

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Retweeted @codymclain

A Ground-breaking #Productivity App for the worst of the worst Procrastinators. Click here to Get 2-months free use of Comp…

Thread · Different kinds of goals need different definitions of "enough"

1/ Some thinking I'm doing today re the core @CompliceGoals question "Is [what I did today] enough?" For different goals, people would have different answers to "how often & how much do you need to work at this goal?" or "what workflow constitutes effective focus on this goal?"

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2/ Some sample answers to focus question: 1. ~mon-fri 9-5 (eg day job) 2. a few hours every day (eg blogging) 3. a few key habits (eg health goal) 4. every moment (eg mindset goal) 5. periodic deep work sessions (eg one full day each week writing/coding) 6. < what else?? >

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3/ ...and some combinations of the above. When I recorded an album in 2012, it was a mix of 2 & 5, practicing and then spending a day in the studio. Plus of course choosing which songs to record, designing the cover art, etc. (The album: maleidoscope.bandcamp.com)

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4/ I'm considering adding an explicit thing to complice.co for specifying desired kind of focus for each goal, to better guide people towards that focus. eg answering "is this enough?" with "yes/no/day-off"—those answers mean different things depending on context!

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5/ With a deep-work-session goal, the emphasis should be on helping the user set aside a day or an afternoon for that work. Target is 6 day-offs & 1 enough per week. Day job expects 5 enoughs of course, & actually taking the other 2 days off is often itself part of the goal! 😉

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6/ But then for a habit/routine goal, days off should be rare, and the system should help the user reflect on the choices that contribute to adherence. And for a 2h/day goal, the system should help the user come up with what to spend that time doing that feels worth tackling.

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7/ Are there other workflows for goals? How can a productivity system best guide its users to the right kind of work on each goal? How can it help people identify which goals are which? I'm interested in your thoughts!

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Replying to @DhruvaAliman

@DhruvaAliman What are you sampling in this? Obviously the same one as in C2C's Delta, but I can't find it on whosampled.com! (I briefly thought maybe the vocals on this were yours and they sampled you, but the timing doesn't make sense since theirs came out in 2012)

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Replying to Bryan Kam @bryankam ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I really like the current "Is this enough?" reflection, but added workflows also sounds great. One goal I have is quite bursty, in that it is often waiting on others for days or weeks, then there's lots of tasks. I don't know how that workflow might fit in though.

@bryankam Yeah, seems similar another thing I was thinking about that didn't fit in the tweet of 5 above... basically "effectively focusing on this goal means mostly waiting and then responding effectively when certain things happen". Ideas for what other workflows might look like?

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Retweeted @vgr

Ask culture vs guess culture Shame culture vs guilt culture Honor culture vs dignity culture ... what interesting culture dichotom…

Replying to will minshew @wminshew ·

@ValueStockGeek @Avi0xnc @devonzuegel +1. da best

@wminshew @ValueStockGeek @Avi0xnc @devonzuegel Nobody has posted a link to the comic version of The Last Question yet though! imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH

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This thread 🤑 👇

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart ·

This is what I don't get about goldbugs and people who think that the value of currency should never erode over time. Why does society owe you the preservation of your purchasing power? Why should you get to time-travel your wealth without taking any risks?

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@otter_ai What if I need more than 6,000 minutes/month? Am I automatically enterprise at that point, or is there a per-minute overage rate?

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Replying to John Backus @backus ·

My phone is holding me hostage again. Can't read messages in some of my chat apps until I unlike songs on the SoundCloud app, removing them from Offline Mode but also removing them from my liked tracks!!

@backus Which is silly because chat messages take up so little space. Similarly, the camera app claims it can't take a photo, when there's still like 100MB of space left. Obviously getting to zero is bad but there's gotta be a better way.

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Retweeted @backus

Early tech growth often comes from gambling, porn, or piracy. How can we combine all three? My bad idea: describe exact kind o…

Retweeted @reasonisfun

These words each refer simultaneously to the worst thing in the world, and the best thing in the world: problem 1. Coerci…

Replying to John Nerst @everytstudies ·

Too optimistic to assume people think in terms of distributions at all...

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

@everytstudies "The average woman is shorter than the average man". Sure. But also most men are shorter than the average man. The diff in averages is real, but not relevant to specific ppl. (Well, there isn't an average man. No such thing. Most men are shorter than the average male-height.)

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@samgraver @AmandaGosling3 @vaiseys @djmgaffneyw4 That may be, yet here's an article about how pilots were crashing planes because the cockpit dimensions were designed for the average pilot, and *none* of the pilots were actually average in all size dimensions. thestar.com/news/insight/2…

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@cffspns @davidmanheim @robinhanson @Google Broadly, seems like #InadequateEquilibria at play, in hospitals and software companies. Plus yeah, incentives to ship now, debug later.

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Replying to Tiago Forte @fortelabs ·

Here's an introduction to PARA for the unfamiliar praxis.fortelabs.co/the-p-a-r-a-me…

@fortelabs Gotta remove them dots from the image 😉

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Retweeted @willmacaskill

This is so fucking good. It’s exactly how we should think about the big picture of development over time. The world is…

Retweeted @Johnny_Uzan

Don't buy the book because it's on sale. Don't eat the pastries because they're free. When most of the cost isn't financ…

Retweeted @AkiyoshiKitaoka

Chromostereopsis: red in front or blue in front

Retweeted @Meaningness

@ESYudkowsky @_Srijit Formal rationality has to rely on reasonableness to make contact with concrete reality. There’s alwa…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

What are some challenges and complications people face when trying to figure out what they want? Looking for interesting ideas and prompts in this space to write essays about, will share with you when done

@visakanv People arr habituated to orient to what they *don't* want. And the question "what _do_ I want?" is a fundamentally different type. You can watch people answer "what do you want?" questions in the negative.

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Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean

@visakanv People arr habituated to orient to what they *don't* want. And the question "what _do_ I want?" is a fundament…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean True - and, it *is* easier to be certain of what you don’t want than what you want, and those data points can be quite helpful in the search

@visakanv Absolutely! See this blog post: malcolmocean.com/2015/11/what-d… (Which I'm re-reading 3 years later and noting that it's unclear in various ways. But still a useful concept.)

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@samgraver @AmandaGosling3 @vaiseys @djmgaffneyw4 Hm? If we take the extreme case of 100% covariance among all traits, then the pilots who were in the middle 30% on one trait would also be in the middle 30% of other traits. Whereas the less covariance there is, the less this is true.

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@samgraver @AmandaGosling3 @vaiseys @djmgaffneyw4 The wikipage you linked shows many pairs of traits correlated, but even though those correlations are (reportedly) statistically significant, they may not actually be that _large._ And the 20+ things correlated with grip strength probably don't all correlate with each other.

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@samgraver @AmandaGosling3 @vaiseys @djmgaffneyw4 But the solution wasn't constructing special planes, but making the cockpits adjustable so they could be made to fit _whoever_ was sitting in them. I seriously recommend this book on this stuff—it blew my mind! 🤯 amazon.com/End-Average-Su…

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Replying to James Stuber 🌱🌿🌳🍂 @uberstuber ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @fortelabs because of the kerning?

@uberstuber @fortelabs

Tiago Forte @fortelabs ·

I have an important policy announcement. Henceforth P.A.R.A. will be spelled PARA. For benefit of humankind and punctuation keys everywhere

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Replying to @SimonLauSL

@SimonLauSL @otter_ai Okay. I'm going to keep at it it until I hit the limits, but assuming all goes well you can expect to hear from me about Enterprise 😉

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Replying to @hunterwalk

@hunterwalk @grlalx @3FishStudios ...and apparently today's the sort of day where seeing this image makes me tear up. ❤️to all of my friends in California, including the ones I've never met.

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Retweeted @RoopeKaaronen

Why not just call 4E cognition ("Embodied, Enactive, Extended, Embedded") Ecological instead? Isn't that (the ecology o…

Replying to @RoopeKaaronen

@RoopeKaaronen @kkortekallio @Escogar @MerjaPolvinen Seems like Gregory Bateson, who wrote a whole book call Steps to an Ecology of Mind, needs a mention in this thread. Amazon: amzn.to/2Py0TlT Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_…

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Retweeted @CompliceGoals

Doing some high-level designing of a system for refactoring your goals & showing how they evolve. I whipped this up in #…

Retweeted @visakanv

Interesting dilemma: every time you 2x your audience, half the crowd has seen/heard it all before, but half hasn’t. Each ti…

do "doing it wrong" wrong

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Me: "My love for you is enormous. Like a nebula. That is, it's unfathomably large. Wait, where are you going?" @SarahAMcManus:

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Retweeted @fortelabs

Check out my new guest post on the @evernote blog, my strongest case for using digital notes as a long-term knowledge resour…

Retweeted @nickgillespie

If you're tired of a world in which children aren't allowed to play outside or do anything for themselves, check out @Le…

Retweeted @nayafia

Yes! My theory: reading isn't really about what you remember, but how it shapes your thinking twitter.com/thestalwart/st…

"...an Ouroboros made of bootstraps..." - @LordChisholm

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Retweeted @visakanv

Wow this bit from French economist Bruno Theret is a galaxy-brain level take. There’s a relationship between the debt of huma…

This thread though. 👇

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

#nowreading Debt, by David Graeber

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Retweeted @patio11

I want communications channels (and by this I mean Gmail and Slack) to start getting smart enough to do things like “Ah, a rec…

The future is already here, it's just

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Replying to Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen ·

Peter Shor on centralization of effort in funding. Via @skdh's thoughtful essay: backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-pr…. Cf Feynman just after receiving the Nobel Prize

[1 more photo]

@michael_nielsen @skdh I've written about the psychology of how people aren't used to doing this even when funding isn't a concern: malcolmocean.com/2015/11/just-d…

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Retweeted @michael_nielsen

Peter Shor on centralization of effort in funding. Via @skdh's thoughtful essay: backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-pr…. Cf Feynman…

Retweeted @farnamstreet

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Retweeted @visakanv

@punchesbears @GlitchesBrew Original comic by @grantdraws

Retweeted @visakanv

Some moral thoughts: To be a good person in the world, your "love" has to be able to win out over your "fear". This sounds va…

Retweeted @visakanv

Choosing love over fear is a challenging, radical act on many fronts

Retweeted @Altimor

@patrickc Yes, Kindle changed the way we read books and then… stopped there. I want social highlights, notes, flash cards, and…

Really good thread, and impressive level of post-judgmental relating going on in the comments, largely by Corinna. t.co/WLtIjMpJf3

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What is it god for? Absolutely nothing.

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This tweet says it has two likes and a reply, but I can't see them. Replies from a protected/private account I guess? (I assume if someone has blocked me they can't reply to my tweets) ...it feels like "reply" is the wrong word for this situation.

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"You have my compounding interest."

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Replying to @EvanOLeary

@EvanOLeary @autotrnslucence I think this is just a totally different meaning of the word patterns than Jess/KenMcLeod are using. You're talking about something like patterns in the sense of "perceiving how the world is structured" (see meaningness.com/pattern) Ken about unconscious patterns of behavior.

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Replying to Friend Tasshin @tasshinfogleman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Twitter has a feature where you can choose not to show up in views like that

@tasshinfogleman But then wouldn't the purpose of the reply be to send me a notification? As the author of the tweet I can confirm I didn't get one.

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@SlackHQ Having issues with adding this alias. Tried a different alias for :pray: 🙏and it still didn't work. Tried a different emoji and it worked fine. What's going on?

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(I have successfully aliased :pray: to :namaste: on another slack workspace btw!)

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Replying to Slack @SlackHQ ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Oh, that's odd! Are you not seeing any error message when you try adding aliases to 🙏?

@SlackHQ I get the "Names must be lowercase, and can’t contain spaces, periods, or most punctuation." error, shown in the screenshot. I've tried refreshing the page... I'm running a somewhat old version of chrome (59) but I doubt that's it.

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I resonate with this. Also I don't think those paragraphs conflict: it's entirely likely that @visakanv and I *are* among the most open/introspecty people... human civilization has been built on fear, resentment, and denial of such, for millennia, so the bar is low.

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

you know, I like to think that I'm one of the most open and self-evaluate-y, introspect-y persons around and yet, at 28, I'm still discovering that there is so much more fear, anger, rage, resentment, aversion & unhappiness in my heart than I had ever imagined denial is wild 🤔

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Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Right??? And people talk so little about it considering how pervasive it is

@visakanv Right??? And it's so pervasive because people talk so little about it!

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Replying to @Aella_Girl

@Aella_Girl Up and to the right. 📈 The past is leftward and a bit down, and the future is up and to the right. Although when I think about it on a months-scale it has an ring shape for each year.

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Replying to @Aella_Girl

@Aella_Girl This seems like totally your aesthetic and I'm glad you did it.

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Delighted to have the chance to financially support one of the most interesting ppl on twitter. If I had enough 💰 I'd probably just buy @visakanv out of ever having to take a job, just to see what he'd do. (I keep a running mostly-mental list of people I'd like to do this with)

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

This is my Patreon! If you’ve enjoyed my writing and you’d like to encourage + motivate me to go pro *sooner*, you can support my work here 🤓😍 more book threads, more essays, more everything: patreon.com/visakanv

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Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I haven’t quite fully allowed myself to seriously consider that question as seriously as I’m starting to think it ought to be considered. I think the first thing I’d do is draw up a Personal Curriculum of books to read, review, summarizing and translate. And movies and tv

@visakanv It's important to think about! Helps make real the possibility. Imagining what you'd do with fewer constraints can also help you figure out how to overcome your current constraints or what costs would be worth bearing to do so...

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Replying to Slack @SlackHQ ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Sorry we missed that! We couldn't reproduce on our end either. Just to clarify, you can't add any aliases for the 🙏 emoji?

@SlackHQ Seems so. Not surprised you can't repro. I just tried having another team member do it on this workspace and it worked fine. 🤷‍♂️

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Replying to •Freyja• @utotranslucence ·

@devonzuegel The cool thing as well is recently I collected all the annual themes I had had for the past ~10 yrs - really awesome to see growth at that timescale.

@autotrnslucence @devonzuegel I tried doing that a bit with my yearly review blog posts, although last year didn't really have a theme. The post titles: 12017 Yearly Review 12016: A Year of Co-Responsibility 2015: A Year of Freedom 2014: An Objective Year 2013: A Year of Connection 2012: A Year of Projects

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Replying to Devon ☀️ @devonzuegel ·

What are personal check-in cycles you set for yourself? e.g. weekly reflection, monthly financial review, daily journaling

@devonzuegel I do most of this inside the productivity app I built, complice.co. Complice has quick daily reflections ("what did I do towards each of my goals?") and weekly & monthly reflections that build on summaries of those daily answers. Plus a huge yearly thing.

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@devonzuegel I used to have a practice of taking 1-2 days for a major life reflection every 4 months (when my school term changed) where I would shift my goals, design new habits, let go of old ones, etc. Big picture all the way down to just "what do I want my breakfast to be by default?"

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Retweeted @devonzuegel

What are personal check-in cycles you set for yourself? e.g. weekly reflection, monthly financial review, daily journaling

Replying to Slack @SlackHQ ·

@Malcolm_Ocean We've done a bit more digging and it turns out there's a bug that prevents aliases from being added to emoji with skin tone selected. Your teammate must not have a default skin tone selected, that's why they could successfully set the alias. Sorry for the trouble!

@SlackHQ Ha! And that explains why I could successfully alias :christmas-tree: into :yule-tree: 🎄

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Retweeted @visakanv

@eigenrobot smolbrain: i like memes normiebrain: i'm concerned about the memes bigbrain: the memes are taking over my mind…

Retweeted @PeterBorah

This went somewhere I didn't expect. twitter.com/swardley/statu…

Retweeted @bryankam

@sebastmarsh Tried Ultraworking at London event yesterday. It blew my mind. Got quite a few things unstuck. I might have hear…

Replying to Maxwell Silverhammer @maximossilver ·

@davidingolcar Mars is the only planet that is inhabited entirely by Robots

@maximossilver @davidingolcar Song: Robots by @BlueManGroup g.co/kgs/e2DyFw

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